Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 16, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 26 April 1895 — Fields Open to Women. [ARTICLE]

Fields Open to Women.

One gets a little bit tired of reading of “another field open to woman” and of hearing men quote Dr. Johnson’s famous and ill-tempered remark apropos of dogs walking on their hind legs in this connection. Women by this time should have learned that the gate to every professional and industrial field is and always has been wide open. Some venturesome woman walks through one of these open gates and forthwith it is solemnly proclaimed throughout the length and breadth of the iand'that another field isopen to women. The only bar to woman’s entering any “field” is her lack of the necessary industrial or professional training. She is not perfect. There are many things she has not yet attained unto, but the bar to her progress comes not from without but from within. Truly her attainments in many fields and her competition with men in the arts, sciences, literature, the professions, business, and the trades have within this last century proved that she does not do many things ‘‘so badly.” We are informed by a lover of figures that there are 850 “fields” open to women to-day. Nonsense! Do these figures cover the total number of industrial and professional “fields” in existence? There may be only 850 fields which woman occupies, but that is quite another matter. There are, of course, many fields which it is not wise for woman to enter. Suppose a field is boggy and likely to soil her skirts, the wise woman will keep out of it unless absolutely forced in and then she will struggle through It somehow. Now, as to these “fields”—they are of all sorts, some large, some small. Aside from the professions, they are of countless number. For instance, at least one woman in this city keeps a real estate office, and rents, leases, buys and sells, making a specialty of renting either furnished or unfurnished flats. She does an excellent business. A number of women run laundries. Some money to carry on the business and a good understanding of first class work are requisite for this. In hotels women are now employed in more prominent positions than formerly. Hotel men speak very favorably of women holding such positions. Women buyers for large furnishing houses are also a great success of late years. Women drummers are equally successful, though their occupation is less pleasant in that it is always easy. The professions are all of them open to women—aye, and women have discovered the fact and entered in, Let us hear no more of new fields opening to the fair sex. when it is after all, not a question of the fields opening, but of the sex 4 entering.